Developers at Microsoft’s GitHub are being held to ransom

Microsoft’s opens source development platform was last night targeted by hackers, who are demanding payment before they’ll return the hundreds of code sources they stole.

The hackers wiped 392 code repositories, downloading and storing the source codes on their own server.

“What is known is that the hacker removes all source code and recent commits from victims’ Git repositories, and leaves a ransom note behind that asks for a payment in Bitcoins,” reported ZDnet.

The ransom message read:

“To recover your lost code and avoid leaking it: Send us 0.1 Bitcoin (BTC) to our Bitcoin address and contact us by email at [email protected] with your Git login and a proof of payment,”

“If you are unsure if we have your data, contact us and we will send you a proof. Your code is downloaded and backed up on our servers,”

“If we don’t receive your payment in the next 10 days, we will make your code public or use them otherwise.”

Director of Security for GitLab, Kathy Wang, has issued a statement in response to the cyber attack:

“We have identified affected user accounts and all of those users have been notified. As a result of our investigation, we have strong evidence that the compromised accounts have account passwords being stored in plaintext on a deployment of a related repository,” Wang told ZDnet.

Jeremy Galloway, a security researcher at Atlassian, has independently confirmed that large number of users have been affected by this hack.

GitHub suggests to enable two factor authentication to add an extra layer of security to your account. Here’s how you can set it up.